The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space Read Online Free Page B

creatures. ‘Why?’
    ‘Never mind why!’ he is shouting, and we are not used to this from Mr Storey, he is not being gentle with us now, ‘just show me your hands!’
    This is not the way it was, with his hand carefully cupped round mine and both of them moving together around thedial. Now he grabs my fingers and turns my hands palm up as if looking for hidden sweets. Perhaps he thinks we have stolen something. He is rough with my hands, he squeezes my fingers before dropping them. Then he inspects Jeanie’s. Then Flora’s.
    ‘Ah!’ he points to something on Flora’s right hand, ‘what is this?’
    I look at it, and as Flora stays silent, perhaps because she is too frightened to speak I answer him myself, ‘It is a graze, Mr Storey. A small cut.’
    ‘Ah!’ he says again, ‘and caused by what?’
    ‘Caused by the washing tub, sir,’ Flora has found her voice, ‘I cut myself on my mother’s washing tub.’
    I am angry now, even as I watch Mr Storey drop Flora’s injured hand and hide his eyes behind his own fingers, as if he is ashamed of what he has just done. ‘Do you think, Mr Storey,’ I say, perhaps a bit too loudly for that small room, ‘do you think that when we are not at work here we simply fold ourselves up in a cupboard and wait for the next day to look at some more of your plates?’
    He doesn’t reply and Jeanie and Flora are staring at me. But I may as well continue, ‘When we get home we must all help our mothers, and look after our younger siblings. We cook, we clean, we wash. Why –’ because it really is very odd and now the flush of anger has obviously left him, I can dare to ask him, ‘why are you inspecting our hands?’
    ‘Because we have found blood.’ He looks at me and I have the odd feeling that this is the first time that he has actually seen me in all the time I have been working here, ‘The woman who did this must have cut herself. There are drops of blood scattered on the ground behind the tower and all along the path down the back of the hill.’
    When I ride the bus home that evening the story is in the newspapers, accompanied by a photograph of the Observatory.Whoever did it left behind a handbag with some safety pins and currant biscuits wrapped in paper. I try to imagine fire flickering around the tower and flames reaching up to the sky, but all I can think of is a woman running from the damage, shedding blood all along the way, and wondering what will happen next.
    And now, nearly two years later, I am still here. Flora and Jeanie have both left to work in the munitions factories and I am in charge of the new girls because Mr Storey has left too. I lay out the plates each morning and then sometimes I leave them busy at their work and walk over to the West Tower. The only reminders of that morning in the spring of 1913 are a new clock for the telescope and a narrow seam of pale brickwork in the tower wall. It’s easier to feel than to see, so I run my hands along it, thinking of Mr Storey who has gone to fight in France.
    Today, after my visit to the mended tower, I take the book of stellar classifications to the Astronomer Royal. I have an idea for checking the accuracy of our work that I need to discuss with him.

 
     
    How accurate do you need to be (to get on in life)?
    At first Catherine is pleased. Pleased they’ve chosen her to do the interview on the news about their discovery. It’s a good piece of work and she’s contributed to it. The closest documented near-miss yet by an asteroid, due to pass between Earth and the belt of satellites only thirty-six thousand kilometres above our heads. The astronomical equivalent of a car roaring past you on the motorway at a hundred miles per hour and missing you by a whisker.
    They like this metaphor. The team developed it over coffee in the canteen, just after they submitted the paper and realised it was going to be a big story. They deserve this attention in the media. They’ve all worked hard. Although to